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There are several topic with a similar title but I can't seem to find an answer to my question. I have Windows 10 installed on a 500Gb Sata SSD and I want to move installation to a 1Tb NVMe drive. As I understand, I'll need additionally another drive (for the recovery image) and a USB stick (with Windows Installation Media); and the process goes like (following this guide)

  1. I connect my NVMe and format it as NTFS and it becomes, say, a drive D;
  2. I create a System Image to an external drive (say, E);
  3. I create a Windows 10 Installation USB stick, set it as a boot device in BIOS;
  4. I boot from it..
  5. ..and use the System Image (from the external E) I created to Recover Windows and install it to D;

The part that I don't understand is at what moment my NVMe D drive will get the C letter: should I format my old C and change the letters before the step 5, while booted from the USB somehow? Or that's done automatically after Windows is recovered? Am I missing anything else?

Sergey Kritskiy
  • 203

2 Answers2

13

It would be much simpler to :

  • Clone disk C to E
  • Replace physically C with E while disconnecting the old C
  • Reboot. The boot disk is always named C.

A product you could use for cloning is AOMEI Backupper Freeware.

harrymc
  • 498,455
3

This can be easily achieved (as long as the new drive is larger than the old one) from outside Windows. One advantage of this method is that it works for instance with drives encrypted by Truecrypt/Veracrypt.

Concretely:

  • Get a bootable USB Linux; the point is to get to run a terminal shell. An easy way is to get gparted.

  • Boot from the USB. Open the shell (may require closing/minimizing the Gparted window).

  • Your hard disks will most likely be /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. You can confirm this for instance with sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda and sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb to see what disk each is.

  • When you are certain about which is which disk, make the cloning happen with the command sudo ddrescue -d -f /dev/sda /dev/sdb clone.logfile (first device is the source, second is the destination). The file at the end is not strictly necessary, but it allows ddrescue to resume the process if you interrupt it (you just issue the same command again).

  • When the cloning is finished, you remove the old drive and if necessary configure the bios to boot from the new one.

  • Now you get to boot Windows from the new drive. You need to decide if you will enlarge the Windows partition (if your partition configuration is standard and there is nothing after Windows) or you will create a new partition. Both things you can do from Computer Management.

  • If needed, partitions can be rearranged/resized by using GParted. Not if the disk is encrypted.

Martin Argerami
  • 828